


No Comfort in the Shade

by roseygal99



Series: BatFam Angsty/Whumpy Stuff [2]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Dick Grayson Has Issues, Dick Grayson Whump, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:07:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27636584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseygal99/pseuds/roseygal99
Summary: There was a time when Dick had thought himself lucky. After the things he’d lived through, he ought to be more damaged, but he’d managed to grow into a fairly well-adjusted member of society. He’d taken pride in that fact, relished it. Gotham had done its worst and he’d escaped unscathed.To realize now that he’d been wrong, that Gotham had in fact crushed something precious inside of him, was a blow he wasn’t sure he could come back from.ORDick Grayson is having a hard time and Bruce is there to help.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne
Series: BatFam Angsty/Whumpy Stuff [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2049657
Comments: 6
Kudos: 180





	No Comfort in the Shade

**Author's Note:**

> TW: mild/brief thoughts of self-injury. 
> 
> About four sentences. Mostly in the form of punching things and a broken hand that goes uncared for.

Dick dragged himself into his apartment, shedding his coat, keys, and shoes on his stiff beeline to the bathroom. In the shower, he dangled his head under the stream, the heat cranked until it nearly burned, and willed the muscles in his back and shoulders to relax, his heart and breathing to slow.

When he got out, his phone was about to vibrate off the edge of the sink, the screen packed with a flurry of unread messages that were still coming in. A quick glance at the names was enough for him to know what they all said, or have a pretty good guess, at least. Barbara, Tim, Damian. He ignored them all, shutting it off and leaving it behind as he wandered into his bedroom, leaving small puddles on the hardwood in his wake.

He pulled on a faded cross-country hoodie and joggers in the dark, and the clothes clung to his wet skin as he tossed a hesitant glance toward his bed.

The type of exhaustion he felt now was the type that clings to bones, that no amount of sleep can touch. Which was just as well, since sleep had not been kind to him these past few days.

At times it was elusive, leaving Dick watching for hours as his curtains faded from navy blue to pale gray with the sunrise. Other times it was a violent, painful thing that forced him upright in bed, gasping and disoriented, his room smelling eerily of burnt furniture and ash, and his ears echoing with screams and sirens. He had no way of knowing what type of night this would be, but he was in no rush to find out.

Pushing damp hair out of his eyes, he headed for the kitchen instead. He wasn’t hungry or even really thirsty, but his hands went for his standard late-night fair all the same. He filled the coffeemaker with water and flipped it on, letting the machine’s quiet whirr fill the silence as he grabbed a bowl from the counter and filled it with cereal.

Typically, he would go through this process on autopilot, his mind on a million other things, but tonight his movements were careful and intentional in a way that took all of his concentration to maintain. He had the overwhelming urge to run or break something, to do anything other than sit quietly in a room and stare at food he had no intention to touch, and he knew himself well enough to know that if he wasn’t careful right now, he would find himself back in his bedroom exchanging his pajamas for the black and blue suit tucked in the back of his closet and hitting the streets. But after the events earlier tonight, he knew that was probably the last place he should be right now.

The coffee machine beeped, and Dick moved the full mug out of the way as he muttered to the open air, “Want one?”

The presence he’d felt across the room stirred, and he glanced over his shoulder in time to see the silhouette by the window step further into the living room.

“You won’t be able to sleep.”

“It’s decaf.” Dick’s voice was flat. Without waiting for either acceptance or rejection of the offer, he added more water to the machine, packed in new grounds, and prepared another cup. He watched the dark liquid fill the mug as footsteps behind him crossed from the carpeted living room to the kitchen tile, followed by the gentle scrape of a chair.

When he turned back around, Bruce was sitting, waiting for him. He wasn’t in the cape and cowl, instead still dressed as he had been back at the manor a few hours earlier – a dark mock turtleneck and gray slacks. Dick wondered idly if Bruce had come through the window dressed this way or if he’d simply picked the lock at the door. Either option felt incredibly incongruous with the clean ensemble. If he hadn’t felt so off, he might’ve laughed.

Dick took the seat across from him, and Bruce’s eyes tracked his movements carefully. The younger man was suddenly hyperaware of the bruises and scabs forming along the knuckles of his right hand, left purposely unattended, and the way his fingers were twitching restlessly.

“How is he?” Dick asked after a few long minutes of silence.

“His lip stopped bleeding after a while,” Bruce explained calmly. “He stopped cursing a while after that.”

The dull pain in Dick’s knuckles flared with the memory of Jason’s jaw, hard and sharp like he had punched a brick wall. He was fairly certain he’d fractured a bone or two in his hand – the punch had been sloppy, overly emotional – but he’d decided to let the ache sit there, heavy and throbbing without the temper of a painkiller.

“It was my fault,” Dick conceded. “I didn’t… I overreacted. I must’ve had a little too much to drink or something.” He hadn’t actually had anything to drink at all, but it felt like the easiest excuse in the moment. “I’ll apologize the next time I see him.”

Again, there was silence as Bruce, apparently unsatisfied with this response, simply waited. It was the same tactic Dick had watched him use during interrogations, but in those situations usually someone was dangling a few stories off the ground and the silence was ominous. Here, there was none of that foreboding air. Just an empty sort of waiting.

“It won’t happen again,” Dick added drily. He wasn’t entirely sure this was true. Even now he wished he could be hitting something, something hard enough to tear the skin on his knuckles and send painful reverberations up his arms and into his shoulders. He wanted to hurt. He wanted a pain sharp enough to pull his attention away from the gaping chasm in the center of his chest.

Almost reflexively, he clenched his injured hand into a tight fist and relished the quick agony.

“What I’m trying to understand is why it happened at all,” Bruce said.

“I told you I was just buzzed. It’s not a big deal.”

“You weren’t.” Bruce’s tone was matter of fact rather than accusatory. It felt like an accusation anyway.

Dick studied him with growing annoyance. “What were you keeping tabs on me or something?”

“I’ve seen you buzzed enough times to know what it looks like. You weren’t drunk, Dick. You were wired. On edge. You have been for a few days now.” Bruce rested his forearms on the table, leaning forward as if to get a better look at him.

Dick noted his leg bouncing under the table and stilled it. The sudden stillness made his entire body feel uncomfortable and he shifted awkwardly in his chair.

“I’m fine,” he said, a little too brusquely. “Just need to get some sleep.”

“Have you been having trouble with that lately?”

Dick’s teeth clanked together in his mouth. He rose to pour his untouched cereal into the garbage disposal and let the blades run longer than necessary to grind up the soggy flakes. When he turned it off, the sudden silence pressed against his ears like a physical weight.

“How are the Donovans?” Bruce asked.

The question was soft, so soft that Dick almost didn’t catch it. But he did, and the jittery, violent energy that had been crackling just beneath his skin vanished like air being sucked out of a balloon. He suddenly felt impossibly hollow, like the slightest breeze could topple him, and he welcomed the sharp pain that had exploded in his right hand as he gripped the edge of the sink. It served as another means of grounding him, anchoring him here.

“How?” Dick murmured.

“Barbara.”

Babs. Of course.

She was the only one Dick had told anything to, and even she had only gotten the barest threads of information. She knew only that there had been a housefire, that a child had died.

“You’ve been checking up on them at their new apartment.”

Dick didn’t even bother asking how Bruce could have possibly known this.

“I couldn’t find him,” he explained, staring, without seeing, at a small puddle of milk in the sink left over from the drained cereal. At the same time, he was trying to stop smelling smoke, to stop feeling the weight of a limp child in his arms and hearing a mother’s screams.

Behind him, Bruce did not move from his spot at the table; he did not speak. Dick was oddly grateful for this. For time.

“I looked everywhere, but I just couldn’t find him,” Dick continued, and his voice was flat again, empty like it was echoing out from a tomb. “When I did, it was too late. He was in a crawlspace behind his bed. He was eight. Kyle. Kyle Donovan.”

There was a long silence as Dick stood and trembled with tension, then finally Bruce said, “I’m sorry.”

Dick glanced over his shoulder, half-expecting to find an even, almost disinterested stare and instead he found Bruce’s face a mask of empathy. Like most of Bruce’s expressions, this one wasn’t dramatic. His mouth wasn’t twisted into a frown and his cheeks weren’t glistening with tears, but it was there in his eyes.

And Dick knew that the empathy there was misguided, based on a false assumption that he was struggling to grapple with the loss, that he was mourning. How could he explain how wrong this was?

_I’m not mourning_. _I’m nothing._

After Dick had emerged from the burning building with Kyle in his arms, he’d carefully, wordlessly set the limp boy on a gurney and watched EMTs dive into CPR that he knew wouldn’t work. Mrs. Donovan had been screaming, her shrieks battling with the wail of incoming fire engines, and he’d locked eyes with Mr. Donovan. The man’s soot-covered face had glowed in the light of the flames, and Dick had heard himself offer a too-stiff apology that the man was clearly too shaken to process. And he’d left then, disappearing easily into the shadows amidst the chaos, and arrived back in his apartment still reeking with the uniquely sharp scent of burnt carpeting and furniture and insulation.

And he’d stood in his living room in the dark and waited for something, anything to come. Some semblance of normal emotion, of feeling. He’d grasped for it desperately like a child trying to catch dandelion seeds on a windy day, but he’d come away with nothing. So, he’d showered and gone to bed still smelling of housefire and watched his curtains until morning. And with each passing day since then he’d grown more and more agitated with himself, with his lack of feeling, and eventually that frustration had transformed him into the short-fused terror he’d been all day, culminating in an unwarranted haymaker and a likely-broken hand.

This wasn’t the first time Dick had suspected that something was wrong with him. After his parents had been killed, adults had tiptoed around him for weeks, treated him like a volcano on the verge of eruption, like a glass teetering on the edge of a table. He’d realized afterwards that they had been waiting for him to breakdown, to dissolve into a weeping heap. It would have been an understandable reaction, especially for a kid, but the moment had never come.

Even at the funeral he hadn’t shed a single tear. Back then he’d been called “brave” and “strong.” He’d been congratulated for his composure and he’d taken some solace in that. Perhaps his reaction or lack thereof wasn’t a symptom of a deeper issue. Maybe it was a sign of his fortitude. He’d tucked those fears away then, content never to explore them again.

Then Kyle Donovan happened, and Dick once again felt utterly dead inside.

Empty. The internal silence that made him think of vast, barren spaces; of sand blowing across endless dunes and the cracked, frozen wasteland of the Arctic.

And this confirmed what he had quietly feared all along. That somehow, somewhere along the way something deep and vital inside of him had broken. As if a whole part of his brain – the one responsible for grief – had simply stopped working. Or perhaps it had shriveled slowly over time, unnoticed and choked by neglect like a plant left to wilt in a corner.

There was a time when Dick had thought himself lucky. After the things he’d lived through, he ought to be more damaged, but he’d managed to grow into a fairly well-adjusted member of society. He’d taken pride in that fact, relished it. Gotham had done its worst and he’d escaped unscathed.

To realize now that he’d been wrong, that Gotham had in fact crushed something precious inside of him, was a blow he wasn’t sure he could come back from.

So now as he stood in his kitchen thinking about a child he had failed to save, and struggling even to shed a tear, he found Bruce’s expression, his open but misguided display of empathy, to be like the twisting of a knife.

Suddenly Dick realized Bruce was speaking, a steady rumble in the quiet.

Dick blinked. “What?”

“I said you should sit down.”

Dick sat and stared at the old yellow table between them. It had a sort of retro, 70s aesthetic. The floral pattern in the decorative plastic covering was faded, the petals resembling abstract squiggles more than anything else.

“What’s wrong with me?” he asked quietly. “These things happen and I just… I don’t _feel_ them anymore. I don’t know if I ever did.” His voice hitched then, perhaps betraying his words, and suddenly his vision blurred with tears. “What’s wrong with me?” he asked again.

“We all process grief differently,” Bruce said. “It’s not a matter of right or wrong.”

“But what if I’m not processing it? Babs thinks I’m upset about the kid, I bet you did, too. But that’s the problem. I’m _not_ upset – at least, not like I know I should be. I feel like a goddamn sociopath.” Dick balled his fists in his hair, his elbows braced on the table.

“It’s like I go through life most of the time and I feel normal. I get happy, I get annoyed, I get sad. But when major things happen, like someone dying, I just… I don’t know. It’s like I shut down. I’m just empty. Like I’m physically incapable of feeling beyond a certain point.”

Dick was really crying now, tears streaming down his face and dripping off the tip of his nose, but he didn’t know why because deep inside, his dominant feeling was still an _absence_ of feeling. A painful, gaping abyss.

“Sometimes,” Dick whispered, “sometimes I think – I think I shouldn’t even be here. I should be in Arkham with the rest of the–”

Suddenly there was a hand on his shoulder. Bruce had switched seats so that they were sitting almost side by side. Dick hadn’t even noticed.

“You’re not,” Bruce said, cutting him off. His voice was not hard, but stern, and he held Dick’s gaze as he spoke, his words crisp and intentional as if willing Dick to hear each syllable clearly. “You do not belong in Arkham. You are not broken.”

And suddenly the outburst that hadn’t come when Dick was orphaned or after the housefire, the one that he had begun to accept as being beyond the scope of his emotional capacity, crashed into him like a tidal wave. And decades of grief and pain rushed in to fill the void that had lived in the center of his being for far too long.

It filled him like a physical thing, pushing against the inside of his ribs and chest and threatening to burst through.

Dick dropped his face into his hands as a sob wrenched itself from his throat, as his body convulsed with the force of them. And in the darkness of his closed eyes, he saw it all in sharp relief – every moment he’d absorbed as a child and into adulthood, every crippling tragedy that he’d unconsciously chosen to repress, to crush into a manageable size and pitch into some far-flung corner of himself. Those moments – those pebbles of memory – towered over him now, forming an immense mountain of suffering that he now had to scale.

And he understood now, perhaps for the first time, why he had never done this before; why his subconscious – and maybe it wasn’t so subconscious, after all – had chosen to avoid this part of himself. It was because this was too much, far too much for any one person to climb and come out on the other side whole.

This, Dick was certain, truly would break him. What he had experienced in his life, the things he had seen, were the sort of uniquely awful things that demand to be left in dark corners and tucked into locked drawers, lest they take everything from you.

He was only vaguely aware of the strong, yet gentle arms wrapping around him, pulling him in and holding him as he tipped towards hyperventilation.

“I want you to breathe with me,” Bruce instructed. The older man took a few long slow breaths, waiting for Dick to match his rhythm. Dick’s head rose and fell against Bruce’s chest, and after a while it started to work. Dick felt himself calming, if only slightly.

“You are not broken,” Bruce said again, his chest rumbling against Dick’s ear. “And you’re not alone.”

And when Dick pulled back, he saw it in Bruce’s eyes. A profound and gut-wrenching understanding, their mutual experiences with tragedy and loss resonating on a frequency most are fortunate enough not to understand.

And he realized that Bruce had his own impossible mountain to scale and that he had been scaling it for most of his life. A slow, clumsy process that involved just as much time slipping backwards as it did inching back up. And as if for the first time, Dick noticed the deep grooves in Bruce’s face, the lines and old scars that he now suspected had just as much to do with Bruce’s inner battles as his external ones.

“I’m here,” Bruce promised. “I’m right here with you. I won’t let you go.”

And Dick knew what he meant. _I won’t let you become like so many of the monsters we stop every night. I won’t let you disappear into the darkness._

“How do you keep going?” Dick asked, his eyes on the table. After a lengthy pause, he looked up.

Bruce’s gaze was distant as if he were genuinely searching for an adequate response and struggling to find one. Finally, he said, “You decide that the alternative is unacceptable.”

Dick considered this. It wasn’t a warm and fuzzy answer; things rarely were where Bruce was concerned. But even so, it fit somehow. It made sense to him.

He nodded then sighed, and the sigh turned into a yawn. Without thinking, he rubbed his eye with his bad hand and cursed quietly.

Bruce rose, retrieved an ice pack from the freezer, and returned to the table where he laid it gently over Dick’s knuckles. “I know I taught you to punch better than that,” he said.

Dick’s mouth twitched into a rueful grin. “I decked Jason in the middle of your dinner party and it’s my form you’re upset about?”

“It was sloppy. He should’ve been able to dodge it.” Bruce’s expression was even, but there was a joking lilt in his tone that Dick imagined most people would miss. Then, more seriously, “I want you to come back with me. Stay at the manor for a while.”

A few years ago, this might have sounded like an order, but now Dick could have sworn it sounded almost like a plea. Bruce’s gaze was fixed on the ice pack, his brows scrunched ever so slightly.

“Bruce,” Dick gasped, “are you inviting me to a sleepover?”

He was already feeling more like himself. Not necessarily better – to be honest, Dick was fairly certain he wouldn’t feel better for quite a while – but he could see a way out now that he hadn’t been able to see before, and it left him with a spark of hope.

Dick was satisfied by the long-suffering sigh he got in response.

“Isn’t Jason staying with you for a few days?” he continued. “He might not want me around much right now.”

“He’ll live.” Bruce rose and Dick followed suit, keeping the pack pressed into his hand.

“I’m more worried about myself,” Dick muttered. “Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask – how did you get in here? You didn’t climb in through the window dressed like that did you?”

Bruce tossed a devious grin over his shoulder but said nothing as he headed for the door.

“Wait, did you?” Dick asked, suddenly desperate. “ _Did you?_ ”


End file.
